OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — When President Bush announced his support of an ambitious Middle East peace plan four months ago in the Oval Office, he offered an admonition to everyone concerned: “In order for peace to occur, all parties must assume their responsibilities.’’
Today, a new wave of retaliatory violence has erupted in Israel and the Palestinian territories because none of the participants — including the United States — did what was expected of it or accepted responsibilites critical to advancing the peace initiative known as the road map, according to Israeli and Palestinian officials, diplomats and analysts.
The Palestinian Authority took no significant, permanent steps to improve the security of Israelis, a top priority of the road map. Israel made no meaningful efforts to stop the expansion of Jewish settlements and outposts in the Palestinian territories, one if its primary mandates. Palestinian militant groups, despite proclaming a cease-fire, did not stop their attacks against Israelis. And the United States failed to serve as a public, transparent monitor, an essential ingredient of the plan.
Now the peace process that was designed to correct the flaws that domed a long string of previous efforts has disintegrated, leaving Israelis and Palestinians at such an impasse that officials on both sides say there is little hope of reviving the road map in the near future. “The cease-fire between the Palestinian factions overshadowed the first phase of the roadmap,’’ said Yossi Beilin, who has played key roles in Israeli -Palestinian peace negotiations for the past decade on behalf of Israel. “The world went on vacation and left us alone. When the cease-fire broke, it exposed an unimplemented road map, and we did nothing. We are back to Square 1.’’
Beilin, like many analysts, said none of the parties met its obligations: “The Israelis did not dismantle outposts, and the Palestinians did no visible acts to fight terrorism.’’ US monitoring of the peace process, he added, was “a big failure.’’
Despite the high hopes that accompanied the release of the road map, many analysts believed the plan — which was written by officials from the so-called Quartet that comprised the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations — had little chance of success.
Critics said it relied too heavily on incremental measures that avoided tough decisions on the core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians — the location of borders, dismantling Jewish settlements, the final status of Jerusalem, the return of Palestinian refugees to homes in Israel.
Khalil Shikaki, a leading Palestinian pollster and political analyst and other analysts also questioned the utility of supplanting the Palestinians’ elected leader, Yasser Arafat, with an appointed government acceptable to the United States and Israel. Proponents argued that the road map was an innovative plan that addressed the shortcomings of previous US mediation efforts with several new concepts: Non-negotiable timetables leading to the creation of a Palestinian state, so Palestinians would know they were not involved in another seemingly endless round of negotiations that did not yield a sovereign, independent country; simultaneous steps on political, economic and security fronts, so the process did not hinge solely on the issue of Israeli security; and aggressive, public monitoring by international observers who would hold the Palestinians and the Israelis accountable for fulfilling their obligations under the plan.
But from the very beginning, the plan suffered from a lack of US and Israeli enthusiasm. Together, they delayed the road map’s release for four months, then struck a deal to selectively implement it, according to political analysts, Israeli officials and Western diplomats. When Israel’s Cabinet finally endorsed the plan, it did so with a list of 14 reservations that struck at its heart, rejecting timelines and international monitoring and conditioning the entire plan on improvements in Israeli security.
“There’s nothing wrong with the substance of the road map,’’ said Saeb Erekat, formerly the Palestinians’ senior negotiator with Israel, “but we need to implement the road map of the Quartet, not the road map of Sharon and his 14 reservations.’’
For the Israeli government, the road map centered on one overriding issue: Ending Palestinian attacks against Israelis.
But neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians embraced the road map and sincerely implemented the measures it called for, said a senior diplomat from one of the Quartet parties. “What prepared the ground for the collapse we’re seeing now is that both sides were taking tiny little baby steps and not taking at least one big step to show the public this is real change,’’ the diplomat said.
The road map mandated that the Palestinian Authority begin “sustained, targeted and effective operations’’ to dismantle terrorist infrastructure, including confiscating illegal weapons from groups such as the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.
Instead, the newly appointed prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas — who was engaged in power struggles with Arafat and was viewed by many Palestinians as an Israeli and US puppet — repeatedly professed that his security forces had been too weakened by nearly three years of Israeli attacks to counter the militants. More importantly, Abbas said he did not want to engage in a civil war with powerful, popular militant groups. Instead, he focused on persuading them to agree to a three-month moritorium on attacks against Israelis.
A mutual cease-fire was one of the first steps called for in the road map, and persuading the militants to unilaterally declare a truce was considered by Abbas’ government to be a major achievement and goodwill gesture toward Israel. But Israel rejected the Palestinian cease-fire out of hand as a ruse and never matched it.
Some Palestinians now concede that the Abbas government could have moved more aggressively to rein in the radical groups. This week Palestinian Authority security forces began destroying cross-border tunnels between Egypt and the Gaza Strip that have been used to smuggle weapons — the kind of preventive measure that many Israeli officials said could have been taken two months ago.
- Arab News Opinion 29 August 2003
